Placing an advertisement (“ad”) in a medium that reaches the largest target audience has long been the goal of advertisers. One way of achieving this goal is to target people through media contexts, such as video media, that attract an audience of likely customers. For instance, advertisers place movie trailer ads for upcoming movies before a main feature movie to target an audience of moviegoers. Also, advertisers place ads for upcoming or adjacent programming after a broadcast program to an audience that is already watching television on that particular channel.
The advent of VCR's (video cassette recorders) and similar technologies have changed the way that people receive video media. Through the use of time shifting, which allows video content to be viewed at a different time, viewers are able to view programs at home whenever desired. Viewers are also able to pre-select broadcast programs to be automatically recorded on a videotape medium and viewed later. Advertisers often place ads for upcoming videos on the videotape medium before a main feature to reach an audience of home movie viewers. Similarly, a recorded broadcast program captures the ads for upcoming and adjacent programs while recording the selected program to the videotape medium. In accordance with the nature of time shifting, viewers may watch a video days or even years after its original capture, and consequentially, ads on videotape are likely to be less effective in reaching a target audience. In the case of ads for adjacent television programming, the ads may become totally moot because the adjacent program has already aired by the time the ad is viewed.
The more recent advent of digital video technologies, such as the digital video recorder, has introduced random access capabilities to video viewing. Due to the serial nature of analog videotape, programs must be viewed in a sequential order. Even if a viewer chooses to fast forward beyond one program to watch a second-recorded program first, fast-forwarding necessarily continues the serial scroll through a videotape, albeit at a faster rate. Randomly accessed digital recording, on the other hand, is a medium that allows the viewer to scroll through an index of captured programs, and then choose to view them as preferred, or to not view them at all. Therefore, an ad could still become moot, or moreover, never even be viewed.
In addition, some randomly accessed mediums, such as DVD's and laser disks, have content that is fixed at the time of recording. Thus, an ad is frozen in time, making it susceptible to the same shortcomings as analog video.
The Internet represents a medium that is ever changing, and in which advertisers have used different techniques to deliver ads to target audiences. To view a web page on the Internet, a user enters the URL of the web page or clicks on a link to a web page. The web page itself is fetched from the appropriate web server, and an ad is fetched from the ad service. The ad service attempts to determine which ad to send to the viewer based on which web page the user has requested, among other factors. Because the ad service is located on the server side, the ad service generally relies on one-size-fits-all rules to determine which ads to display for a particular page request. Because the ad selection process is centrally located, performance requirements often necessitate a simplification of the logic used to select an ad.
In addition, an Internet ad service is “coupled” to the user request. An Internet ad server typically bases the ad it serves, at least partly, on the URL of the requested web page. It is also important to note that an Internet ad server needs to send an ad to the user as quickly as possible, because the user is expecting to receive the requested web page (along with any other third party content, such as ads) as soon as possible. The fact that the typical Internet ad server is time-constrained makes it more difficult for the ad server to perform elaborate methods to determine which ads to send. Overcoming this problem typically requires the use of very high-end computers to serve the ads.
Ultimately, Internet ad serving solutions are request-based. That is, an ad is served from the central server in response to a request. Because many requests are fulfilled in parallel, ads for competing products may be served for each of the separate requests. While in theory the server could track ads being served to each client and eliminate the serving of two competing ads to the same client, the centralized ad serving environment, with millions of users and with ad serving distributed over many actual servers, makes this extremely difficult.
Moreover, an Internet ad server needs to be in substantially constant communication with the Internet, since ad requests are received constantly. Such a system was not designed to work in situations where the ad-receiving client is only intermittently connected to the Internet.
Lastly, it is always desirable to advertisers to locate additional locations for ad placement.